Big News at nOCD: Whats the big news?

Today is a great day! When the new year began we set ourselves the important goal of keeping the nOCD community updated on major events. So now I bring you some very exciting news.

I’m honored to announce that nOCD has just completed a $1 million fundraising round with 7wire Ventures, a premier venture capital firm in Chicago that strategically invests in promising new healthcare technology initiatives. With this new financing and strategic direction, nOCD will have an opportunity to provide more effective treatment to people struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) all around the world. It will help us every day as we continue our work of helping people take charge of their symptoms, regain mental freedom, and say no to OCD.

If you aren’t familiar with OCD, it’s a debilitating psychiatric condition that affects around 1 in 40 adults and 1 in 200 children. Unlike the way it’s constantly stereotyped, OCD is not synonymous with being too neat or uptight. It’s a mental illness that causes people to have specific, torturous thoughts called obsessions that repeat nonstop in their heads. To alleviate the extreme anxiety caused by their obsessions, people with OCD often perform specific actions, or compulsions, which give them short-term relief but exacerbate the anxiety over time. Clinical evidence suggests that people can drastically reduce the negative impact OCD has on their lives by confronting those situations that trigger their obsessions while preventing themselves from turning to compulsions. So, naturally, you might ask, “Why don’t more people with OCD do that?”

The answer: retraining oneself to tolerate distress without resorting to compulsions usually requires extensive treatment. But the OCD treatment system today is broken. It takes the average person 14–17 years to get effective treatment for OCD, and most specialists operate completely out of network, charging $200-$400 per visit. Because effective treatment is so inaccessible, comorbidity abounds: for example, 27% of people with OCD develop a substance use disorder, and 33% end up with major depressive disorder.

Our personal experiences dealing with this condition brought the nOCD team together, and continue to help us relate to the people using our treatment platform. We’re unique in that we combine this first-hand knowledge of OCD with real experience in software development, digital marketing, and data science. Given the urgency we feel to make effective treatment more accessible, and the fact that we have the skills to make it happen, we believe the future of OCD treatment must incorporate always-on treatment resources, giving people the freedom to live more and worry less.

This type of model can also exemplify a new age of mental healthcare, since its always-on, low-cost, and community-centered. That’s why we’re even more motivated to scale nOCD, because we know our hard work will lead to real change for millions of people with OCD and other conditions.

Most importantly, your support has been crucial in helping us build nOCD, and we’d like to wholeheartedly thank you. A little bit of positivity goes a long way, so on behalf of the nOCD team I hope you can celebrate with us during this exciting time.